Why should we care about some "Fast Food" restaurant?

If that was all it was, we shouldn't - though I have grown hoarse over the years pointing out that, though they invented "fast food," they did it when it was really fast, and what is more to the point, when it was really food.

Let's start with the "fast." If you were an actress, five minutes from an important open call that could last for many long hours, and were starving, you could run into the place (conveniently located right across the street from the theater), march straight up to one of the myriad little windows, throw your spare change in the slot, take out the little plate of delicious macaroni and cheese, sit down and finish it off and still arrive at the audition with seconds to spare. Try doing that at Mc Donald's, Horn and Hardart's ostensible successor. And then there was the "food." Made fresh every morning from the best quality and freshest ingredients (often according to recipes created by some of the country's finest chefs and perfected over decades), rushed to each outlet in some of the city's last electric trucks, to be burnished, browned, crisped, and sold, often still hot from the oven, to an unabashedly enthusiastic customer for the price of a few coins. No chemicals, no preservatives, and no junk food. This was gourmet cooking for a pittance. Would anyone describe Taco Bell or Kentucky Fried Chicken that way?


So they served decent food, cheaply and in a hurry, what's the big deal?

When the first Automat opened in 1902, the United States had begun, in earnest, its ascent to becoming one of the most powerful countries in the world. It had done this the old-fashioned way, by assembling an empire made up of less industrialized, militarily backward and agriculture-based territories like those in Latin America, the American West, and the Far East. Through immigration and conquest, there was an abundance of low-wage, but nevertheless often skilled, labor, crucial to the development of a strong manufacturing-based economy.

This process was also made possible due to the triumphs of modern mechanical engineering. The steam engine and the machinery it ran, the train, mass production techniques, and abundant fuel for refrigeration and power production, all played key roles. Access to plentiful water and good agricultural land, albeit much of it wrested from its former owners, completed the picture. It almost seemed as though man had conquered not just other men, but nature itself, mountains, tunnels and bridges, the material plane in its entirety, and was ready to move on to greater triumphs. We had collectively evolved past the stage of producing the goods needed to prosper, and were ready to take on other greater challenges, perhaps even to devote ourselves to higher purposes.

Nowhere did these pieces fit closer together than in the great northeastern cities, the original Capitals of the Republic, Philadelphia and New York. Densely populated with both long-time residents and newer arrivals, their diversity of activity and regular European-style urban organization, multi-story buildings and ubiquitous streetcars, defined the modern city.

When Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart began their little luncheonette business, across the street from Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia in 1892, they were too busy cooking and cleaning to have any time to imagine the day, thirty years later, when they would be serving a million dishes of food a day to a growing army of famished and grateful patrons. As novice entrepreneurs with a limited amount of borrowed money, they were probably worried that they wouldn't last even one year, having used up their entire investment putting together their first tiny enterprise.

Luckily, Frank Hardart had learned in a previous job in New Orleans, how to make a great cup of "French Roast" coffee. Like the founder of STARBUCKS over a century later, he realized that the magical properties of caffeine, heated sufficiently to rush it into the bloodstream of urbanites, frantic for the fuel needed to get around the next lap, was black gold, legal dope, and a mighty fine cup of joe. You could hardly find a better way to spend a nickel.

One other invaluable insight shared by these erstwhile partners, was that people were tired of the shabby fare passed off as food, which typified moderately priced restaurants of their time. In contrast to the nearly universal contempt in which restaurateurs held their low-income patrons, Horn and Hardart began to upgrade and improve their offerings until they stood stories above their competitors. During the ten-year period in which they operated their modest establishment, they were rewarded with a growing and grateful clientele.

It was at this point that a timely trip by Hardart to Europe uncovered the existence of the "waiterless restaurant," an innovation based upon a vending device capable of serving food through little windows. A shipment of these devices to the States followed quickly and, after a series of radical modifications and improvements, their first implantation on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. The popularity of this system was established rapidly and expanded to a chain of eighty stores, equally divided between New York and its native Philadelphia. Its dual and seemingly contradictory identity, as a rare and exotic phenomenon, an absolute must-see destination for tourists from around the country and the world, and yet the most commonplace, and ubiquitous place to grab a good and quick meal, for locals, began almost immediately and never ended.

The survival of this institution and especially its ability to maintain its unique high standards over that period of time, for nearly a century, is quite remarkable. The expansion of the operation into the first large-scale retail take-out operation, with hundreds of "Less Work for Mother" outlets also selling freshly made and high quality fare, marks them as the precursor of another of the 20th century's major gastronomical business developments. Along with their ability to see the future and show the way to legions of others who could not, their story is a textbook example of the rewards of doing things right, not just doing them first. Using "economy of scale" as their lever, they were able to demonstrate that you did not have to compromise quality in order to be able to provide value. Still, few others in their wake have ever been able to combine the two notions with more skill and adherence to principle than those two fellows did.

Aside from their fare, the most remarkable and influential aspect of the Automats was the places from which they operated. By securing 99-year leases on the most trafficked corners of New York City, they became, in effect, the most comfortable and accessible, virtually permanent, common spaces within the most important city of the 20th century. Their very existence broadcast a message of hospitality and openness that warmed the hearts of both rich and poor and suggested a world in which the best of everything would be available to one and all regardless of station or circumstance. Their convenience and good cooking allowed them to fill the needs of both the busiest tycoon and the most relaxed derelict, as likely as not, seated at the same table. "To each according to his needs" said Marx and Engels; but these stone capitalists did a better job of spreading that notion than a country full of communist bureaucrats ever could.

Politics aside, there is another group of individuals who found the provision of free space to sit, to gab, to conjure, and to speculate invaluable. They are the creative types who also tended to use New York City as a laboratory for their ideas, a place to evolve and test new notions, new ways of looking at life and expressing those discoveries. As an example, the hottest show on Broadway this year and probably for the last few decades is "The Producers." A part of the stage set is the Automat. Why? Well, the simple answer is that it is a highly visual object, widely identifiable, and long a feature of the Times Square milieu central to that show's storyline. Another reason may well be that when Mel Brooks, the mad genius behind the production, and his madcap buddies from the old Sid Caesar "Show of Shows," Neil Simon, Nat Hiken, Woody Allen etc, needed to get some air and some chow, they hot-footed it over to H&H. There, they knew a dozen of them could carry on at full volume, as though they were back in their studio, and create those insane routines for Caesar, Coca, and the rest, to collapse us with hilarity each week. In fact, Simon and Allen used to rent the last Automat, at 42nd and 3rd avenue, in its waning days, for private parties to celebrate the release of their latest movies.

Here's a joke: A fellow goes into the Automat and starts pumping nickels into the machines and taking out pieces of pie, one after another. After awhile the manager of the place begins to wonder what's going on and goes over to the fella and asks him what he's doing. "Leave me alone," says the guy, "can't you see I'm winning?" Am I trying to say this was a funny place? Hardly. It was already true during the Depression, that an uncomfortable number of homeless and other ambulatory types had begun to make the Automat just a touch dreary. It is legendary how the free tomato ketchup and a shot of hot water turned into some of the best "tomato soup" in town and the free lemons and ice water added quite a refreshing "lemonade" to the meal. It was the closest thing we ever had to the world-class commissary, a place for all the extras in the movie called "Life" to catch some chow before the big scene went before the cameras. One fascinating question is how many people, temporarily down on their luck, survived partly due to the existence of these places, and later went on to become our captains of industry and masters of their fates?

Writers, dancers, painters, musicians are only some of those who must endure long periods of learning and developing their skills and sensibilities before they may emerge as fully-formed and productive members of their professions. Students, out-of-towners just learning their ways around, recent casualties of broken relationships are other characters in search of themselves who may have found the clean floors and cheap eats vital to their sanity and survival at some point in their lives. Parents of limited means looking for a place to show their kids a great time on a very limited budget, gave thanks for the genuine fun you can have there, without worrying about a little noise being made. It is amazing how many people have warm thoughts about what was, after all, just a business, who have invested it with a kind of mythical aura, who smile when they remember what experiences they had.

There was, tucked away in a safe at the Horn and Hardart's headquarters, a book which some called "The Bible." While it was true that both principals in this company were Catholics, there was no religious text in this volume. Instead it was filled with secret formulas for less than exotic offerings like macaroni and cheese and baked beans with precise measurements of quantities and, just as importantly, systems for preparing these dishes. Everything was specified as carefully and accurately as possible, and even after the death of both Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, it was declared than no variations on these recipes would be allowed. No new-fangled "improved" or "modernized" ingredients, no chemicals, no cheaper substitutes could ever be included in them. These were not passing fancies; they were alchemical formulae, and woe to he who messed with them. You would not have to just answer to the ghosts of H&H; you would have to deal with the keepers of the book and the flame.

Another sacred principle was Consistency. Everyone who worked at the company knew about the infamous "Tasting Table" that, every week as regular as Sunday mass, met to make certain, through random selection of dishes from all of the many branches, that local managers were doing their part to keep the sacred fire lit. Out of the temple one could be cast for a grievous enough burning of the dinner rolls, or overcooking of the mashed potatoes or the creamed spinach. This was not simply discipline; this was the purification of the ritual ceremony called "Lunch." This was the raising of the torch into that dark cave of economical repast, the elevation of the common man on tiny cushions of taste buds unto a possible saved man, given a glimpse, through little glass windows, of the promised land and its bounties.

One day, while I was standing on 53rd street in Manhattan, Bill Gates and his entourage happened to be passing by. I fell into step with him and asked whether he had ever heard of the Automat. He answered "yes" so I went on to tell him that I liked to call it "Windows 02" after the year in which the first one was installed. What I didn't have the chance to tell him as he whisked along, was how the most estimable, audacious, and idealistic phenomenon, a tour de force of (mechanical) engineering and the elevation of the visual, the instantaneous, the effortless and the economical had led inexorably to the creation if its own dialectical opposite: overpriced, over-hyped, processed junk food. I would have followed that observation with a warning, that no matter how well intentioned and valuable a journey into the unknown may be, the most important and difficult task is keeping what is discovered there from being turned, over time, into its own worst enemy.


Proposal

A weekly or monthly TV show be produced, made up of recollections and stories and jokes of aficionados of the Automat, which tend to give insight into the past century and the gifts and hazards it has provided.


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Was the Automat the Lost City of Atlantis?
The Last Automat